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The law firm AI visibility checklist.

Twelve checks your marketing team can run today, no audit required. It covers the four things AI reads when it decides which firms to recommend: directory presence, entity consistency, content structure, and freshness.

  • Directory presence
  • Entity consistency
  • Content structure
  • Freshness cadence
  • AI bot access

Takes about 20 minutes to run. Most firms find at least 4 to 5 gaps they did not know were there.

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Work through the 12 items below. Most firms find 4 to 5 gaps they did not know were there.

Check each item as you go. When you are done, run a free live check to see exactly where your firm stands, and how you compare to the firms already appearing in AI recommendations for your practice areas.

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Section 1 · Tier 1 directory presence
  • Chambers & Partners profile is claimed, complete, and reflects current practice areas and attorneys.
    Chambers carries the highest citation weight of any source in legal AI retrieval. A firm absent from or poorly described in Chambers loses recommendation weight on ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude at the same time.
    Check: log in to Chambers Connect. Are the practice area descriptions specific rather than generic? Is the attorney roster current? Is the firm description factual (numbers, deal types, client industries) rather than aspirational?
  • Martindale-Hubbell profile is complete, with all practice areas, attorney bios, and contact information.
    Martindale has the longest publishing history of any legal directory and strong entity recognition weight with Claude and ChatGPT. Outdated profiles create entity fragmentation that lowers AI confidence in attributing your credentials to your firm.
    Check: visit your firm's Martindale listing directly, not just your dashboard. Is the attorney roster current? Is the AV Preeminent rating shown if you have one? Is the address format exactly as it appears on your website?
  • Best Lawyers and Legal 500 profiles are current and accurately reflect the firm's positioning.
    Both are editorially verified, so AI systems treat them as high-trust sources. Being listed but poorly described wastes the trust signal: it tells AI you exist, but not what you are actually best at.
    Check: does each ranked attorney have a complete bio that states a specific practice focus, not just a practice area label? Are the current-year rankings reflected? Does the firm description match how you want to be positioned?
  • All Tier 1 listings use exactly the same firm name and address format, including suite number and legal entity suffix.
    "Smith & Jones LLP," "Smith and Jones Law Firm," and "Smith & Jones" are three different entities to an AI. Every variation fragments your entity model. "Suite 400" and "4th Floor" are the same office, but AI does not know that.
    Check: open each directory profile side by side. Compare the exact firm name (including punctuation and suffix), street address, suite format, city, state, and zip. They should be character for character identical.
Section 2 · Entity consistency
  • Firm name is identical across every platform: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, and all directories.
    Entity consistency is how AI knows your Chambers profile, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn page, and your website are the same organization. Every discrepancy lowers how confidently AI attributes your credentials to you across all platforms at once.
    Check: Google your firm name and look at the first 7 to 10 results. Is the name format exactly the same on each listing? Watch for "&" versus "and," LLC versus LLP, and whether a DBA appears on some but not others.
  • Attorney roster is consistent: same names, titles, and practice areas across website, directories, and LinkedIn.
    AI evaluates firms in part through their attorneys. A partner on your website but missing from Chambers, or a "corporate attorney" on LinkedIn but an "M&A specialist" in your directory, reads as different people and dilutes both the firm's and the attorney's authority.
    Check: pick your three most prominent partners. Verify name, title, and primary practice area match across the firm website, LinkedIn, Chambers, Martindale, and any other directory. Inconsistency in even one field carries weight.
  • Website has Organization schema markup with firm name, address, phone, URL, and sameAs links to directory profiles.
    Schema markup is the clearest direct signal you can give AI about who your firm is. The sameAs property tells AI explicitly that your Chambers profile and your Martindale listing refer to the same organization, instead of leaving AI to infer it.
    Check: right-click your homepage, choose "View Source," and search for "schema.org" or "Organization". If nothing appears, your site has no structured data. Google's Rich Results Test will also show what schema is present.
Section 3 · Content structure
  • Each practice area page opens with a specific, extractable 40 to 60 word answer, not marketing language.
    AI retrieves content in short chunks and evaluates each one on its own. "Decades of experience in complex matters" gives AI nothing to cite. A sentence naming the practice, the client type, the deal range, and the track record gives AI claims it can attribute to you.
    Check: open your top three practice area pages and read the first paragraph. Does it state specifically what you do, for what clients, with what credentials? If the first 50 words could apply to any firm in your city, rewrite them.
  • Practice area pages include FAQ sections with natural-language questions that match how clients actually ask.
    FAQ format is answer-ready: each question and answer is self-contained and directly addresses a client query. AI retrieves FAQ content at higher rates than narrative prose, and it targets the sub-questions AI fans out to while it builds an answer.
    Check: do your pages have FAQ sections at all? If so, do the questions sound like what clients ask ("What does an M&A attorney do for a buyer?") or what firms want to answer ("What sets your firm apart?"). AI retrieves the former.
  • Content is written in specific, factual chunks: numbers, outcomes, client types, not aspirational prose.
    "Extensive experience" is not a fact AI can cite. A specific track record (a count of trials, a deal range, an outcome rate) is. AI cannot extract a claim it cannot verify, so paragraphs written only in adjective-heavy marketing language are invisible to retrieval.
    Check: read one practice area page and highlight every specific fact, a number, a named attorney, a case type, an outcome, a client industry. If fewer than one sentence in three carries a fact, add a factual sentence to each paragraph that has none.
Section 4 · Freshness and access
  • A monthly content refresh cadence is in place for high-value practice area pages and attorney profiles.
    Freshness is one of the largest variables in whether content gets cited. Content that has not been updated in roughly 30 days starts losing citation velocity. A competitor with thinner content on a disciplined monthly cadence can outperform a firm with stronger content on a quarterly schedule.
    Check: when were your top five practice area pages last meaningfully updated? View the source and search for "dateModified," which is what AI crawlers read. A meaningful update is small: one current statistic, a new matter reference, or a new FAQ entry resets the clock.
  • robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and Bingbot.
    If these crawlers are blocked in robots.txt, those platforms cannot retrieve or cite your content no matter how good it is. This is more common than it sounds: broad bot-blocking rules added for security often catch AI crawlers, and a single Disallow line can remove your firm from an entire platform's recommendation pool.
    Check: open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and search for "Disallow" rules. Confirm none of these are blocked: GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, anthropic-ai, Google-Extended, Bingbot. If any are blocked, that platform cannot cite you.
Law firm AI visibility checklist · Selectio.ai selectio.ai/checklist
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The checklist shows you where to look. The check shows you exactly where you stand. The free AI visibility check maps your citation share across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot, and benchmarks you against the firms already appearing in your practice area.
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